Former Credit Suisse banker becomes Coinfloor chairman

London-based bitcoin exchange Coinfloor has brought in Adam Knight, a former senior manager at Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs, as executive chairman.

Knight, who has been an angel investor since leaving Credit Suisse in 2011, has also taken a stake in Coinfloor, which is trying to build a market for high-frequency trading in bitcoin.

At Credit Suisse, Knight led a global commodity derivatives trading business and a fixed income department. Before that he ran the global metals trading business at Goldman Sachs.

The former banker says that he has been monitoring and buying bitcoin for the last year and has been impressed with how the currency has stood up during that time, despite shocks such as the Mt. Gox debacle.

Explaining the decision to take a punt on Coinfloor, he says: "Having spent my career trading commodity markets I understand the exchange, clearing house and storage models well and wanted to find a team building a platform in this area with the right skills and approach to build a robust global Bitcoin financial services business."

Coinfloor has made much of its commitment to security and regulatory compliance in a bid to avoid repeating Mt. Gox's mistakes. Traders are required to use two factor authentication, while all bitcoin are stored offline in secure storage systems to thwart cyber-thieves. The platform is fully compliant with ISO27001 and has registered with HMRC for anti-money laundering.

"It is measures such as these and new initiatives soon to be rolled out that will enable Coinfloor to service both Bitcoin experts and professional traders whilst providing simple to use and understand services to extend Bitcoin usage to a broader set of new users," predicts Knight.